by Omar Musa
Flakes of gold paint are falling from the face of a saint, falling on him like sunlight.
* * *
‘When did that shit get to Oz, anyway? Fucken tidal wave.’
‘World War II, bro. The Japs used to be high on the shit. Shabu, they called it. Kept em rampaging. Every army done that shit, throughout the ages. Nazis had amphetamines, too.’
‘Nah, nah, it was the gay bars. Early nineties, mate. The faggots used it first for parties, then it got into other clubs.’
A semicircle of ten men, all white, most of them smoking. Aleks is in the Aussie yard. There’s the Islander yard, the Aboriginal yard, the Lebanese yard, the Asian yard, the Terrorist yard and the Boneyard for people who need protection: dogs, rapists and informants. The heat waves unspool in great ripples, and through it the inmates walk in lines with the jerky movements of marionettes. High winds today. Aleks feels as if he is in a dream within a dream, marooned somehow in a place as lonely and desperate as a space station.
‘It’s our version of crack. Three generations hooked on the fucken shit. Dirty as,’ says Clint, an old crook Aleks knows from the outside.
‘Don’t knock it till you tried it.’
‘Sucking a glass dick? Fuck no.’
‘Remember when it first come out? Big bags of shard-like diamonds.’
Aleks has another story. ‘They call ice kamche in the Town. Rock, little pebble. That meant Macos first brought it here.’
‘Nah, nah, no way!’
Another voice cuts in, and everyone goes silent, even Aleks. ‘If some cunt is dumb enough to buy it, then I’m gonna be smart enough to sell it. This is Australia, mate. Race or get erased.’
Torture Terry is a redhead with a square jaw and a loose bottom lip. A Queenslander, he slowly drifted down the coast making a piecemeal existence from armed robbery. But since getting inside, Terry has become infamous for the rape of new inmates. ‘I do it till they start liking it, mate – then I get a new one,’ he had whispered to Aleks early on. He knows the justice system inside out – sly enough to slip out of a few years here and there, but way too far gone to ever go straight. Mostly his tatts are homemade, probably done at a young age with a protractor and Bic ink, but on his wrist he has a delicate tattoo of a swallow in flight, the only beautiful thing about him. When asked about it, he is rumoured to point at the swallow and say, ‘This is what I make em do.’
Aleks looks at his knees, scratches his throat then looks back at Terry. For all intents and purposes, this animal is considered his equal: same uniform, same yard, same company. Aleks feels ashamed. To people outside they were both to be demonised; or, even worse, pitied. Aleks wonders why Terry isn’t in the Boneyard or why nobody has put a hit on him. Then again, death is almost too good for this animal.
Terry is now holding court. ‘It’s the fucken Asians, mate. They’re the ones bringing it in. Ruining our country with drugs and whores. They take our jobs, too, mate. And they don’t even speak English.’
Some of the men nod. Aleks speaks jovially. ‘Oh, yeh. Suppose you got a degree in medicine, ay? They took that day job you had working in an office too, did they?’
The men laugh nervously.
‘But this is my country, mate,’ says Terry, smiling with lightless eyes.
‘Oh, yeh. You a Mabo, are ya?’ Aleks is still smiling, too, but the tension is palpable.
‘Fuck that! Look, I grew here, they flew here.’ For a tiny moment, every man is perfectly still, like statues or pieces on a chessboard, waiting for some divine revelation, when suddenly Clint nudges Aleks, breaking the tension.
‘Hey, I got something to talk to you about, mate. Business opportunity.’ He offers Aleks a ciggie and jerks his head.
Aleks takes the ciggie and turns with Clint. They walk away and fall in step with the river of pacing men who are all discussing crime: how they got caught, how they might succeed next time.
‘Bloody Terry,’ says Clint. ‘Don’t worry about him. Always carrying on like a half-sucked cock.’ Aleks laughs. He’s surprised to see Clint inside. The odd jobs they had done together were simple, a bit of cash on the side.
The sky is inescapable and there’s smoke on the wind, most likely from a bushfire somewhere. Aleks remembers a story Ulysses Amosa had told him when he was a child.
In the story, a beautiful woman is about to be burned at the stake for murdering a baby. Just as the flames are about to close around her, she sends a message to her brother far, far away, who sends spirits in the form of bats to flap out the flames with their wings. When the astonished villagers see her alive, standing untouched among the cinders, she says to them, ‘We meet on the crossroads of life.’ Aleks finds himself saying these words to Clint, who looks at him strangely. They smoke and pace.
‘So. How you going for cash, mate?’ asks Clint.
‘All right. Businessman like me always has a Plan B.’ Aleks grins but he’s lying. He had paid his lawyer ten thousand dollars straight off the bat and might have to pay another ten grand soon. He left Sonya a few grand in their bank account but it won’t last long. What if he gets more time? Plans need to be made. His family would help her, of course, but they didn’t have all that much either. Then there was the mortgage to worry about. If his trial went badly and he had to go back inside, the whole bloody thing would fall to pieces.
He feels a pang, wishing that Sonya could get up out of bed and work. She’s a smart one with a medical science degree. He once knew a man hooked on Xanax who thought the government had turned his eyeball into a video camera. The man stared at the sun for three hours to try to burn out the retina.
‘Well, never hurts to have a bit more cash,’ says Clint. ‘And this is a good one, like the old days.’
They laugh. They’re both thinking of the same scam, something they’d done a few times. They would sit on a hill thirty kilometres from the City and watch the bushland. If they saw a car go down a certain road, then switch its lights of halfway, they knew it was where a weed plantation was being watered. They’d wait an hour for the car to leave, and then hit it. Easy money, especially if you make the weed a bit heavier. One occasion, as they had gathered the weed, Aleks had seen an old kangaroo bone on the ground, a perfectly clean femur with a big ball on the end. It glowed white in the moonlight. Aleks had picked it up and surreptitiously slipped it through his fly and told Clint to look over. He then tipped the enormous, moonlit appendage up through the zipper and Clint’s look had been one of sheer horror.
‘Anyway, just think about it. Not much risk. Just money. Get ya back on ya feet once you get out,’ says Clint.
‘Yeh, or put me back in here.’
7
She,
a twist of pale smoke
between the criss-crossing lasers
and cursive of bodies.
She,
all hips and legs and curves,
floating, bending, popping
into an alphabet
of perfect b-girl control.
Me,
chewing my chain,
fixing my cap,
looking around,
but soon, fuck it,
I’m reacting
to her controlled explosions of movement.
Heaps of kids
haven’t seen a b-boy before.
What kind of shit is that?
There used to be more solidarity between the elements,
b-boys performing between acts.
‘I miss b-girling.’
‘Yeah. The atmosphere. The smell,’ says Solomon.
‘Deep Heat?’
‘Yeah. Someone working their arse off on a move and then nailing it at a battle.’
We’re at a Thundamentals concert.
She wanted to go,
even though it was sold out.
She went along the line and eventually wrangled two tickets,
one for free.
She matches me drink for drink at the bar.
‘Pool? I’ll ki
ck your arse. I’m a real tomboy.’
Afterwards,
I tell her that I let her win.
She wants to talk about the race riots,
but that’ll bring the mood down.
Word is that
a young boy is in a coma.
Still unclear what happened –
seemed like a free-for-all.
Scarlett guides me through the door
with one hand on the small of my back.
It feels weird.
‘Oi. Loverboy.’
Jimmy is in a new polo.
Rather than looking hurt,
as usual,
he seems chilled as.
‘Pity more good acts don’t come through here, ay?’
Scarlett seems to cautiously like Jimmy.
He shouts to be heard over the music.
‘Deadset bro, I swear when I look him in the eye —’
‘Ha.’
‘Yeah, yeah. When I look him in the eye,
it’s like he understands my thoughts,
and I can understand him too.
I send him messages, mental pictures in my mind.
Saw a doco, right, where this chick could do it with big cats.
They can understand heaps, bro, even complex ideas.
Animals are way smarter than we give em credit for.
They just have different, um, different frames of reference, bro.
Like this thing I was watching, right —’
I haven’t seen him so excited since the last Wu Tang album dropped.
They rib me about not looking after Mercury properly
and I laugh and buy a round.
A young black guy called Remi is warming up the stage
with a DJ and a drummer
and while it’s sampled beats,
they sound fresh,
unlike anything else at the moment.
Rarely see a black dude in Aussie hip hop.
It’s troubling, ay.
Scarlett notices, too.
It’s her first time to an Aussie hip hop gig
and she is looking around between sips.
‘So many white people here. Not like this in Auckland.’
‘Yeah. Aussie hip hop is pretty bloody white. There’s more women than
there used to be, but,’ I say, a bit defensively.
‘Not on stage.’
She once told me
that NZ has problems with racism, too,
but they can always point at Australia
and say, ‘At least we’re not as bad as them.’
When the dude finishes his set,
there is just the drunken chatter of the crowd.
Scarlett tells Jimmy a dirty joke
and he cracks up.
She has a bold, open-mouthed laugh
that shows her white teeth.
I’m observing her too closely to laugh
and she notices and whispers,
‘Scared of a little rude joke, Solomona?’
‘Nah, I think it’s you I should be scared of.’
These Thundamental dudes put on a hectic live show,
bobbing and weaving
over a mess of leads.
Haven’t seen them perform in ages.
Tuka has a skater/hippie swag,
bouncing one-footed
off speakers into the air.
Morgs is mean on the cuts.
Jeswon floats at the back of the stage,
coming forward for his verses,
attacking the beat with vicious sixteens.
Something in the water up in the Blue Mountains, ay?
The soundman is fucking the levels
but it doesn’t matter.
The vibe’s there.
They do their big love song, ‘Smiles Don’t Lie’
and as the crowd sings along,
Scarlett and I kiss.
‘Are we cheesy or what?’ she says.
‘Yep,’ I reply.
Jimmy waits for Scarlett to go to the toilet
then leans over.
‘Oi. Guess who I bumped into?’
‘Who?’
‘My old man.’
I suddenly feel sober. ‘Bullshit.’
‘Serious.’
‘The fuck he want?’
‘All right, I didn’t talk to him. I saw him outside work, sitting in the back of a ute.’
‘The back of a ute?’
‘I think he wants to talk.’
‘The fuck for?’
‘Dunno. I reckon he wants to make amends.’
I know that look. Somehow wounded, somehow excited by the danger.
‘It doesn’t make any sense. No one’s seen the bloke in years,’ I say.
‘I know.’
‘Pssh. If it is, we should beat the cunt senseless,’ I say.
‘Yeah. That’s what I reckon.’
‘Let’s do it. I’ll come with ya.’
‘Nah, nah. I just wanna see what he says. I got it under control.’
I wrinkle my nose. ‘Just be careful, James.’
I can’t concentrate on the rest of the show.
* * *
Scarlett’s place doesn’t have air-con.
Against the doorframe,
she takes my dick out of my jeans.
She squeezes it between thumb and forefinger
and a droplet appears.
She teases it with the tip of her tongue.
I try to hold her head but she keeps unfastening
my fingers from her hair,
undressing me with one hand.
Her back is covered with purple tatts,
stars and swordfish and coral reefs.
On her legs are scars,
razor marks at perfect intervals,
twelve per leg,
moon coloured.
She climbs on top of me
and guides me in.
She’s not very wet.
We begin to move slowly
and she parts her legs to accept me deeper.
This room is so hot.
I touch her nipples,
long and dark and pierced.
With her right hand she holds my throat
and with the other she slowly begins
to slap me on the right cheek,
once every few seconds.
We’re moving faster now and she’s wetter.
She tightens her grip on my throat.
The slaps become harder
and more painful,
but with the same regularity –
each slap turns my head further to the left.
Something anchored deep in me rising.
My face is scalding.
Her teardrop tattoo becomes liquid,
runs down her face in a single trail,
falls onto my chest
and evaporates with a sizzle.
I’m losing my breath.
Now the pain on my cheeks
blade-sharp and my skin unbearably hot.
I’m holding her breasts tight.
When I come it is painful and explosive
and I lose breath completely.
Her eyes have been closed the whole time.
We’re lying in bed,
not touching.
It’s too hot.
And something’s wrong.
‘Why did you buy the greyhound in the first place, Solomon?’
‘Dunno.’ What’s she driving at? ‘To be honest, I wanted to show the boys that I could be responsible for something, look after something. Fucked it up.’
‘Ah, yeh. The boys.’ She’s staring straight up. I suddenly crave a cigarette and think about getting up when she speaks again. ‘Do you have any female friends?’
‘Course.’
‘Ones you haven’t slept with?’
‘. . .’
‘Your group of mates is a cock forest, Solomon. Admit it.’
‘It’s not that bad. They’ve been my mate
s forever, what do you want me to do?’
We lie in silence.
Unlike with Georgie, I don’t want to argue.
Then she says, ‘Don’t you hate people who are all style over substance?’
She’s been dropping shit like that all night since the concert.
I try to smile. ‘Ouch.’
‘I’m serious. If you don’t contribute anything, anything at all, what’s the point?’
I realise she’s for real. ‘Why do you keep seeing me, then?’
‘Because you’re a good fuck.’
‘Jesus.’ Whatever she’s doing, it’s working. I’ve never been more angry or turned on.
‘What about companionship? Don’t you think you need that?’
She laughs. ‘I don’t need anything. Least of all from you.’
I want to make her take the words back.
She’s loving it,
suddenly self-destructive.
‘Used to getting your way, aren’t you Solomon?’
I stand up, shaking.
‘See you again soon? I’ll call you,’ she says.
‘I’ll think about it.’ I want to hit her.
‘I’ll see you next week. Don’t take yourself so seriously, Solomona.’
She’s still smiling.
I leave,
thinking about Georgie,
lovely and safe and dependable.
Dependent.
8
On the TV: